What lore do you ignore?

[Lady_Silvermoon]

You're blurring two things here: someone having knowledge of the future, and what causes people to act.

If there's some higher-level embodiment of Fate in this story's universe that drives people to act in a certain way, then Venat is as much a puppet as the rest. She is not the controller of fates and doesn't have influence over what other people will do; she's simply relying on the sequence of events in which things will happen as she has been told they will.

And if there is no driving force of fate, then there is only a world shaped moment-by-moment by the decisions of the people living in it, and those people are in control of their own path at the time they are taking it, no matter whether someone from the past has knowledge that they will do it in future, and no matter whether someone in the future knows that it happened in history.

G'raha did not somehow magically decide to save the world because Venat knew he would; he made that decision for himself, and Venat has learned about it as "future history". That is all.

But without knowledge of "future history" you don't really have the choice to do anything differently. The only person that can choose to act differently is someone who knows what they did before and the results of their actions making Venat the only person with true agency in the FF14 universe. Everyone else is just following a script. We do what we do because it's what we've always done.

ETA: Actually that's not true. The WoL could also choose to act differently and chance the course of events because they also have knowledge of the future.

[Iscah]

But without knowledge of "future history" you don't really have the choice to do anything differently.

There is no need to do things "differently" though – that implies that something is happening a second time. There is only one moment in all of spacetime where G'raha makes his choice, and he chooses it for his own reasons, not because some distant observer is already aware of what he chose to do.

Venat is no mastermind of fates; she simply considers the future that you describe to her and accepts to take her part in it. If anything, she is the one who has lost agency of her own future and can now only play the part that has been told to her.

...or perhaps she did struggle against her dictated fate, and she was able to act differently and split off a timeline that we will never see but the ancients are saved ultimately due to the warning we gave to Venat – but that can't happen without the original timeline still happening as well.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

There is no need to do things "differently" though – that implies that something is happening a second time. There is only one moment in all of spacetime where G'raha makes his choice, and he chooses it for his own reasons, not because some distant observer is already aware of what he chose to do.

Venat is no mastermind of fates; she simply considers the future that you describe to her and accepts to take her part in it. If anything, she is the one who has lost agency of her own future and can now only play the part that has been told to her.

...or perhaps she did struggle against her dictated fate, and she was able to act differently and split off a timeline that we will never see but the ancients are saved ultimately due to the warning we gave to Venat – but that can't happen without the original timeline still happening as well.

G'raha chooses to do it because of every moment that led up to that moment. But the moments he's experiencing are being curated by a god aware of the future. Things are happening again and again because we're in a loop. We go to the past which prompts Venat to sunder the world and set up the Ascians to do the rejoinings, which leads to our creation, so we go back in time and tell her all this which prompts Venat to sunder the world.

The only people with enough knowledge of what's going on to break the loop are Venat and the WoL and while the WoL has chosen inaction, Venat has chosen to do everything in her power to maintain the loop. G'raha will always make the same choices because he's unaware of the loop. The only people capable of making different choices are those aware of the loop and that's Venat and the WoL.

Sure the WoL telling Themis and therefore the convocation about Meteion and Venat's plans to sunder the world *might* cause our timeline to end, which was a risk the people of G'raha's future were willing to take and commended for doing so. To plant seeds they'd never see grow. And both Shadowbringers and 6.5 taught me it's wrong to doom a world to save your own. Unless it's the Ancient world, I guess. Then it just can't be helped or changed or nothing. Just gotta accept the eradication of every man, woman and child without even clearing your throat and throwing a "by the way..." out there in an effort to help them.

Traversing space and time when it comes to saving the WoL, but pimp shrugs when it comes to saving the Ancients.

[Iscah]

Things are happening again and again because we're in a loop. We go to the past which prompts Venat to sunder the world and set up the Ascians to do the rejoinings, which leads to our creation, so we go back in time and tell her all this which prompts Venat to sunder the world.

The only people with enough knowledge of what's going on to break the loop are Venat and the WoL and while the WoL has chosen inaction, Venat has chosen to do everything in her power to maintain the loop.

The term "time loop" is a simplification. It's more like a series of interlocking time-travel-related events that make some people's path from "past" to "future" rather more squiggly than it is under normal circumstances, but that doesn't mean that the people are stuck in a loop or living through the same events multiple times.

Venat is not seeking to maintain some trapping loop indefinitely, but to ensure that in this one sequence of events, things play out as you told her they would and will lead back to your existence and your seeking her help in Elpis. Once the world has reached that point, the history she knows is over and everything else is up to you.

What are you thinking a time loop would even look like? Do you think Venat is somehow stopping time from progressing beyond the point where we travel back to Elpis? Why would she do that? Her end goal is saving all of humanity (which, whether we agree or not, she sees as continuous with her own ancient race), and the route to do so is equipping you with the knowledge that you need and then trusting in you to defeat Meteion.

Additionally, the WoL does not "choose inaction" in Elpis but has no choice but inaction. This is a vision of the past and they need to learn what happens in this timeline's past. There is nothing to be prevented, because it already happened, and even Elidibus warns you of this before you enter the portal - that you cannot change the tragic outcome, only observe it. Our time to act is in the present, not the past.

[Cleretic]

Venat is no mastermind of fates; she simply considers the future that you describe to her and accepts to take her part in it. If anything, she is the one who has lost agency of her own future and can now only play the part that has been told to her.

...or perhaps she did struggle against her dictated fate, and she was able to act differently and split off a timeline that we will never see but the ancients are saved ultimately due to the warning we gave to Venat – but that can't happen without the original timeline still happening as well.

My read is that she actually didn't do either of these. She doesn't accept her place in The Time Loop; the scene right after Ktisis basically has her saying that she'll look for other options if at all possible. It just seems like those options weren't really viable. ANd yet, we know she was pursuing them even before the Sundering, because of the Anamnesis Anyder discussion.

But even when we have completed the time loop, we know she's not sticking to it: remember that when we meet her in the Aetherial Sea, we learn that her plan is several layers more complicated, reliant on both events that happened afterwards that couldn't have been part of what we told her (specifically, tagging Meteion) and multiple factors we didn't even know were on the table after we left her alone (for example, the Ragnarok).

If she were simply following her assigned role with no agency, everyone would've been screwed: it was her rejecting that 'future history' being told to her and deciding to be more clever that anyone had a chance of survival anyway.

All this assumption about the time loop is predicated on the assumption that our intel was a perfect blueprint anyway, and the entirety of our eventual success was predicated on the fact it had massive holes: even assuming we were as exhaustive as possible, we had a very limited perspective, and gave her a history with a good ten thousand years of '???'. If your information on the time loop that you're allegedly in is so limited, how can you be sure that any deviation you even try to make wasn't just an unrealized part of the loop? Why can't you just try some stuff?

We explained Hydaelyn's Plan B to her, and then found out about the Plan A much later. How do we know we haven't been surrounded by the failed remnants of Plans C through W this whole time?

[Iscah]

My read is that she actually didn't do either of these. She doesn't accept her place in The Time Loop; the scene right after Ktisis basically has her saying that she'll look for other options if at all possible. It just seems like those options weren't really viable. ANd yet, we know she was pursuing them even before the Sundering, because of the Anamnesis Anyder discussion.

But even when we have completed the time loop, we know she's not sticking to it: remember that when we meet her in the Aetherial Sea, we learn that her plan is several layers more complicated, reliant on both events that happened afterwards that couldn't have been part of what we told her (specifically, tagging Meteion) and multiple factors we didn't even know were on the table after we left her alone (for example, the Ragnarok).

Yes, she says she'll be looking for other options, but to me that just sounds like the precursor to the two possibilities I listed. Either she discovers some alternative path that plays out in a split timeline we'll never see, or the single timeline remains as it is and always was: she searches for alternatives, finds nothing and concludes that she cannot deny that the Sundering is the only viable route that might still save her people - and it needs to be emphasised that whatever reading the fans ascribe to it, it appears to be the intent of the story writers that from Venat's own viewpoint, the ancients and modern humanity are the same continuous people so she believes she is ensuring the survival of her race and not destroying it.

As for your "additional factors", yes, she has clearly put a lot of work and thinking into setting up additional elements outside of what we were able to tell her - essentially solving the puzzle of "why would I tell them to flee?" with "maybe it's all a ruse to get them to build a starship capable of reaching Meteion" - but she is still locked into complying with the bigger parts of what we told her, and is not fully free to act. Imagine how she must have to think about the calamities occurring on the earlier shards - if this is fated, should she try to intervene? Would it be futile? Can she bring herself to sit idle while it happens because it is a necessary event on the road to reaching the WoL's present?

And to come back to the argument that started this tangent, the point here is that she is not in control of people's fates. She can do her best, lay what plans she can to help bring about her goal, but knowing she can plan on other people acting a particular way in a particular circumstance is not the same thing as having control over their fate.

[Anonymoose]

Yes, she says she'll be looking for other options, but to me that just sounds like the precursor to the two possibilities I listed.

I think there might have been like, "two-point-five" broad possibilities, to her, at the time: either she can sufficiently change the course (in which case multiple different possibilities exist) or she cannot change it, regardless of what would happen if she did. Some references to it read as, "Your trip to Elips and what I do from here may change your future." vs. "Your trip to Elips and what I do from here may change my future, making it separate from yours." vs. "Your trip to Elips and what I do from here may create a Bill & Ted Dad's Keys kind of situation." In the end, the true boundaries of which ingredients from which are included in "The Conjunction" are left kind of agnostic from the WoL-centric perspective of the story, imho. I tend to interpret it as kind of a mix of Dad's Keys + It Was "Always" Dad's Keys (from the perspective inside the Source's cosmic spacetime bubble).

She remains optimistic that between her precautions and the Plot-Convenient Amnesia, perhaps things will work out, but that she's actually not going to take our story or our future for granted, she's going to try her damnedest. (Which people often just disregard as "she didn't tho" or "she obviously lied".) Especially in uh... <digs through knapsack>

CITATION:

Yet I have faith in mankind's potential. As long as he believes in himself, there is naught he cannot achieve. So I will not give up on him. On us. You may find your world to be very different. Or perhaps the erasure of our friends' memories has sown the seeds of a conjunction between us. We cannot know until the moment is at hand. So shall I strive to do my best, taking naught for granted as I walk my path.

Malgré tout, j'ai foi en l'être humain. J'ai toujours préféré voir son potentiel plutôt que ses limites, et c'est pourquoi je ne baisserai pas les bras. Une nouvelle histoire va s'écrire, séparée, je suppose, de celle que tu as connue. Encore qu'elles pourraient se rejoindre à un moment ou à un autre, compte tenu de l'amnésie de certains de ses acteurs... Qui vivra verra, comme on dit. Dans tous les cas, je tâcherai d'agir au mieux, en me gardant de prendre ton récit pour argent comptant.

Doch ich hab stets an unser Potenzial geglaubt. Es wiegt schwerer als all unsere Fehler. Und deshalb werde ich nicht aufgeben. Die Welt, in die du zurückkehrst, ist womöglich eine andere. Vielleicht ändert sich wegen des Gedächtnisverlustes unserer Freunde aber auch nichts. Wie es wirklich sein wird, wissen wir erst, wenn die Zeit gekommen ist. Ich werde jedenfalls nichts als selbstverständlich ansehen und immer mein Bestes geben.

けれど私は、人の可能性を愛した。不可能よりもずっと。…進む理由は、それで十分。この先に待つのは、あなたが知るのとは別の歴史かもしれない。あるいはエメトセルクたちが記憶を失ったことで、繋がる見込みも生じたのかもしれませんが…。どちらにせよそれは、繋がる瞬間まで知り得ぬこと。私はあなたから聞いたことをすべてと思わず、最善を尽くし続けましょう。

[Theodric]

On the contrary, her motives and declarations have been examined and countered a great many times - particularly in a joint community project where a number of lore enthusiasts came together to source their discussion points in one great, big analysis in the form of a video essay focused on Venat herself.

After spending a significant time posting the same sources across a number of different threads and seeing them dismissed or conveniently forgotten about a few pages later.

The video in question can be found here, with perhaps the most relevant section being the one aptly titled 'excuses':

https://youtu.be/fsk412wCrJY?t=1101

It's admittedly a long video so it might be worth watching it in chapters but everything is sourced from the game itself, various lore related interviews and short stories. I don't know where this idea that the people countering Venat's motivations aren't equipped with sources is coming from since it only takes a look through the post history of someone like Rulakir or Lauront to see that, yes, they do source a lot of their talking points and explain their reasoning and conclusions clearly.

Anyone is of course free to like and support 'cRyStAl MoMmY' but her motives are so paper thin and contradictory that they do not hold up under the slightest bit of scrutiny and they certainly wouldn't be accepted as something to cheer on if they were aimed at the Scions and their loved ones and civilisations as opposed to being inflicted upon the Ancients. Nor would most accept it being inflicted upon any of us in the real world, for that matter.

It doesn't help that - as myself and a handful of others have pointed out many times - it was common here for certain posters to embrace the stance prior to Endwalker that no matter how sympathetic the reasoning or desperate the circumstances there is supposedly never a justification for acts of genocide. Which mysteriously fell to the wayside as of Endwalker's revelations and this is all just really a last ditch attempt to try to cling to the idea that, yes, it was all very sad but it 'had to' happen and/or Venat 'tried' and 'had no choice'.

It's not controversial at all to point out that if she was deliberately withholding information from her people, allowing a disaster to strike and kill large swathes of individuals and also working to turn others against them then that was not making a genuine effort to save them. That is serving the role of an antagonist and saboteur.

Preserving mankind by wiping out the Ancients through an act of deliberate genocide and then replacing them with complete different species in a twisted form of eugenics doesn't really count as preserving mankind, I'm afraid. Which in itself is the main point of contention.

...but even putting all of that aside, the game chose to lean on some of the most lamest and controversial plot devices including mind wipes and time travel. It is being criticised for such as well, since such plot devices rarely lead to a consistent narrative. Then there's the numerous retcons that conveniently change established rules but only in favour of the protagonists which is also being called out.